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Do you know the Simple Present? Check yourself with these coloured wooden popsicle sticks!

It was about time my 4th grade students showed me how much they have understood of the Simple Present. I used a permanent marker to write words and / or phrases onto coloured wooden popsicle sticks, gave each student group the sticks of a single colour, and that was it! They were instantly hooked, and after they had made the “correct” sentences, they wanted to keep on trying to make new, perhaps odd, but grammatically correct sentences out of the same sticks. Success!

Reusing old toddler blocks to play around with sentence structure

Teaching the Simple Present never seems to stop. It is the most basic tense, the tense of tenses. And my 5th grade students needed help understanding sentence structure, especially in the interrogative form. So here’s what we did: I asked them to bring their old toy blocks, from when they were toddlers. Then we taped words and clusters of words on them. Then we played. We kept score among the teams, and I was surprised that even the most reluctant students now wanted to take part! Strong and weak students took their turn making mistakes to learn from. And many, correct, different sentences were created!

 

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Special thanks goes to my colleague Maria Dimitrakopoulou, for sharing this idea on Facebook, and to our School Advisor, Mrs. Marianthi Kotadaki, who is a constant source of inspiration for sharing!